| January 2011

CO M M ENTARY

IN FOCUS
THE MEANING OF MUSIC

Aesthetic Experience and Applied Acoustemology

Blue Sky, White River Liner Notes
Stephanie Anne Spray
Harvard U
Aesthetic experience is founded in the sensorially mediated, intersubjective relationship living beings have with
the plentitude of the world. It is available to the watchful
eye, the receptive ear, to any part of a being that is
stirred and made aware of itself in the cornucopia of
experience. In Art as Experience, John Dewey describes
aesthetic experience as the sharpening of our awareness
of experiential knowing itself and says that, at its height,
it produces a sense of temporal contraction and unity; it
is an experience in which a being is wholly united with
his environment and therefore fully alive (2005 [1934]:
17). Aesthetic enjoyment and expression are already
intrinsic to our perception of the world and imbue it
with meaning. Works of art accentuate this awareness
and are potentially powerful and critical methods for
exploring the phenomenological grounds of aesthetic
experience, as well as its manifestations in and through
cultures.
These assertions form the theoretical backbone of
the experimental phonography project Blue Sky, White
River, on which I have been working as a fellow at the
Film Study Center at Harvard University. The project
uses sound recording technologies to reveal cultural
and aesthetic currents within the everyday through
sounds found in Nepal, which are composed vis-vis local iterations of what artist and anthropologist
Steven Feld has called acoustemologies, sonic ways of
being in and knowing the world (Feld and Brenneis
2004; Feld 1994). In this commentary I have sketched a
rough outline of the theory behind the method as I see
it contributing to the anthropology of aesthetics, sound
and the senses.
The Project

Blue Sky, White River draws inspiration from sound

works in anthropology, art, film and experimental
music while nonetheless remaining at odds with each
of these categories in its amalgamation of ethnographic
and creative logics. It is made from radio and location recordings in Nepal that I have composed into
sequences with reference to local cultural idioms, media
practices and socio-politics. Each sound piece is at once
referential to specific places in Nepal and yet often
edited so as to exceed indexical and documentary function. Some editorial decisions are intended to make
overt the constructed nature of the piece, both for
aesthetic effect and to be reflective of auralitys cultural
construction. The two sound pieces described here
available online at the Sensory Ethnography Laboratory
website (www.sel.fas.harvard.edu/spray)illustrate
some of the hybrid logics guiding the project.
Wind Horse is composed primarily from recordings made in Mukhtinath, a popular site for Buddhist
and Hindu pilgrimage, and along the Kali Gandaki River
basin in Mustang, a region known for its howling winds
and, although in decline, horseracing and caravans.
The sound works title refers to the mythic wind horse

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(Tibetan: rlung rta), which is said to carry prayers on the

wind and whose icon is printed on colorful prayer flags
seen fluttering throughout the region. The piece begins
with a mantra, a shamanic speech act that is also associated with wind because to say a mantra is phuknu (to
blow). It concludes with an impromptu sound performance at Mukhtinath in which I build a shale chorten,
a pile of stones representing the body of the Buddha.
Comprised of a constellation of sounds that are culturally, geographically and historically archetypical to the
region, the work is an acoustic exploration of mythopoetic place and landscape.
The Queens Forest is primarily made from recordings along the Rni Ban (The Queens Forest, est
1960), which borders the southern flank of Phewa
Lake, and from the government-run radio station,
Radio Nepal (est 1951). By juxtaposing recordings
from these two government-regulated entities, both
of which were established during rapid social and
political change in Nepal, the sound work poses alternative sonic narratives to radio and contemporary
conceptions of the natural world. The soundscape of
modernity is heard not only through Radio Nepal but
also in the reflexive use of sound-recording technologies, which have forever altered local acoustemologies
and the perception of the natural world (Thompson
2002). Birdcalls compete with radio, jangling temple
bells, a plane leaving for Kathmandu, and holiday boatpaddlers. A cricket chirps as Nepali women, listening to
Radio Nepal in Rni Ban, talk about the recent death of
popsinger Michael Jackson, who they say had straight
hair, just like a doll.
While the project is ethnographically and geographically informed, its disciplinary ambiguity makes it a
complex endeavor that exceeds academic value alone.
Individual pieces are not necessarily representative of
one specific physical place (although they exploit sonic
metaphors for another kind of place-making), nor is the
listener presented with a specific assertion. The point
is implicit: The works form and content propose that
natural and anthropogenic elements of sonic environments are intersubjectively meaningful, both referentially and aesthetically. Meanings may be elicited
through processes of creative and reflexive editing to
create ethnographically informed, aesthetically motivated phonography. The project fundamentally believes
that listening is indeed more than hearing and attempts
to create and make sense of the sonic environments of
Nepal through composition.
Applied Acoustemology

Since much of cultural anthropology has been

concerned with meaning making, it is not surprising
that anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have
primarily studied sound in music, with sonic environments peripherally considered as they supplement,
inspire or inform musical forms. In general sound has

mostly been but another object for study, with field

recordings primarily treated as data to be mined for
discursive content or as keys to musical analysis. There
are exceptions to these trends, the best-known being
the soundscapes of artist and ethnographer Steven
Feld, such as Voices of the Rainforest (1991), Rainforest
Soundwalks (2002) and The Time of Bells (vol 14,
200407). Lamenting the dearth of professionalism and
experimentation in the anthropology of sound, Feld has
said that [u]ntil the sound recorder is presented and
taught as a technology of creative and analytic meditation, which requires craft and editing and articulation just like writing, little will happen of an interesting
sort in the anthropology of sound (Feld and Brenneis
2004: 471).
Perhaps the greatest challenges to Felds proposal
are presuppositions about hearing itself. Of all the
organs of sense, the ear is most frequently imagined as passive or indefensible and, along these lines,
hearing is thought to be more immediate and poorly
equipped to decipher the unruly sonic world (Schwartz
2003). Dewey writes of the intimacy of sound as it
penetrates and stirs the inner structures of the ear,
and compares it to the relative distancing allowed by
vision, which only excites indirectly as it gives us the
spread-out scene (2005 [1934]: 246). However, the
immediacy and wildness of sound that he and others
describe is not semiotically neutral; we apprehend
sounds within what Feld calls acoustemologies, sonic
ways of being in and understanding the world that
are shaped by a potpourri of environmental, cultural
and historical factors. Although sound most obviously
has constructed meaning within music and spoken
language, Felds notion of acoustemology proposes
that there are significant kinds of understanding, if not
conventional knowledge, available to us through the
wider sonic environments in which music is but one
expression.
Blue Sky, White River explores the terrain of these
other kinds of understanding, attempting to do something of an interesting sort that also contributes to
theory by using sound recordings to reflect on sound
through sound, a kind of applied acoustemology. More
broadly, the phonography project is one of many possible
stabs at an inquiry into aesthetic and sensory experience
through nondiscursive forms of expression. It is a practical application of Deweys thesis that aesthetic experience is already available to us through the senses and
that art practices are ideal for its investigation. I hope
that readers will hear this in Blue Sky, White River.
Stephanie Anne Spray is a PhD candidate in the
anthropology department at Harvard University and
a Film Study Center fellow. She has made a number
of ethnographic documentaries and video installations,
and is completing Blue Sky, White River in addition to
recording sound and conducting fieldwork in Nepal.

Listen to the pieces described here at www.sel.fas.harvard.edu/spray